There is a strange naked sadness beneath the surface of the world which is not unfelt but denied so that life can go on. It is not a product of suffering, or a reflection of its universality, of how many things there are that go against us and cut us down, so much as it arises from the pathos of happiness. We can push against pain, as private, inevitable and overwhelming as it can be - it was always the least we could have expected, having once taken the measure of the world - but happiness can catch us unprepared and open up heights that we dared not admit. Sheer undeserved happiness will make us tremble for the slenderness of our claim to it, but most of all it is its fragility, its vulnerable to the situation in which we came upon it, to the others who seemed to effect it, to the very human littleness of all it took, its forgetting of the necessary revenge of time on us for having wanted to linger, for dropping the mask of discontent. Once you have glimpsed it you see it everywhere, it fills every popular song, the poor brave paeans as well as the laments. Everybody must recognise it instantly, the exposed wound when the bandage is ripped away, so that you wonder if all this time you were the one fool who was blind to what endlessly stares everyone in the face.